


after this

by frith_in_thorns



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Haunting (figurative), Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2020-03-07 23:46:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18883756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frith_in_thorns/pseuds/frith_in_thorns
Summary: "I think I'm having a breakdown," Jacobi says. Conversationally."Well, yes," Isabel says. "I thought that was established."





	after this

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Silvereye](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silvereye/gifts).



> Beta read by Jabberwocky.

In his first second seeing Isabel, Jacobi considers telling her to go away, as if he doesn't know she just flew across three timezones at a phone call from him.

In his first millisecond seeing Isabel, Jacobi very nearly shot her by accident.

"Put that away," she says, and he lowers the gun, hands finally beginning to shake. She stares at him. "I don't even get a hello?" she asks, finally. 

"What's up?" he says, and half-hope she'll hit him.

She doesn't. She looks at him measuringly. Considering. Finally he realises her eyes contain the pity she'd look at a wounded animal with. He drops his gaze.

"So," she says, finally. "What's your big mess? You sounded shook up."

She'd jumped on a plane and come right away, because he'd called. She needs an answer. "I killed someone," he says.

She absorbs this. "You'd better not want my help hiding a body."

"Bet you're practised," Jacobi says, with a fleeting half-grin."

She recoils. "Jesus, Jacobi! The amount of bodies I've ever hidden is _zero_ , because I'm not a _Goddard psychopath_!"

He replays the conversation. Shit. He forgets, because Isabel is all tough choices and hard edges and would, indeed, have made an ideal SI5 agent if they'd waited to recruit her until something on Earth had broken her as thoroughly as the Hephaestus did; he forgets that he's lived on another moral plane from her entirely.

She doesn't know the signs that say, _right here, in the desert, someone burned a corpse down to charred bone splinters and gold teeth._

Isabel stares at him while he remembers that same look on Maxwell's face, a lifetime ago. _Daniel, did you need to kill that man?_

"Jacobi," Isabel says.

_Didn't you see how he was trying to kill me?_

"I'm fine," he says.

"I didn't ask you that."

Her face had, and is still refusing to be convinced.

 _It was a bit disproportionate, Daniel._ Then the enforced coolness Maxwell had been trying to maintain had ruptured, and she'd been sick.

He'd laughed. He'd _laughed_.

"Jacobi," Isabel says, and when he doesn't answer she takes him by the shoulders and guides him to sit on a boulder. "Are you here with me?" She presses a bottle of water into his hands, forces him to drink it.

"I thought things would be different," Jacobi says. "Now. After."

Isabel sits down next to him. "Which things?"

Maxwell never killed anyone up close. Her drones and tech went alongside Jacobi's explosives. Anyone who got killed… _got_ killed, passive tense.

Jacobi, though. If he'd never met Kepler he'd never have known he had a talent for this.

"Jacobi?" Isabel says, again. He's aware there's a component failure somewhere, a widening sense of disconnection. "Daniel?"

_Daniel?_

He's not sure, exactly, what he did, but abruptly his hand is bloody and broken, thick with dust and sand from the rock.

Isabel crowds his field of view. "What are you _doing_ here, Daniel?"

"I'm under contract…"

"If you break it will that put you in danger?"

He shakes his head.

"Ok. You're coming with me."

He does. He stands up to follow, because he really doesn't have any better plan, except maybe to sit back down again with his gun.

Kepler would be furious with him for that thought. Kepler, in a brutally functional way, took mental health very seriously. Breakdowns would absolutely not be tolerated.

"I think I'm having a breakdown," Jacobi says. Conversationally.

Isabel stops walking and turns back to him. "Well, yes," she says. "I thought that was established."

"I only just realised."

She stares at him in bafflement. "I see."

"You don't," Jacobi says. "Everything's fine for you, isn't it? You had things — people — to come back to. You look _good_."

She reels like it's an accusation. Which it is. "For Christ's sake! You think coming back from the _dead_ was easy? Or fun?"

He shrugs, defensively. His hand is really throbbing now.

"You've got people here, Daniel. You've got _us_. You'd know that if you hadn't instantly fucked off."

"That's not —"

"That's _exactly_ what happened! We've had no idea where you were. We've been worried sick about you!"

 _Aren't you ever worried about what this job is doing to us?_ Maxwell had asked.

_…No._

_Maybe you should be. I am._

_You can't quit!_ Panic and adrenaline spiked through him. She was of his anchor points; if she left he would fall to pieces.

She shook her head. _I'm not saying I'm leaving. That's the problem, isn't it? What on earth would we ever do after this?_

He's sitting on the ground. Isabel is making him drink more water. He chokes.

She keeps a hand on his arm while his coughs subside. "Where are you?" she asks.

"I don't know," he says. He hears himself, hears the words echo in a wide empty space. _I don't know._ Something inside him, some piece of his bedrock, is crumbling. Has crumbled. 

"Daniel," Isabel says. Quietly. Kindly. "Come back with me. Stay in DC with us."

"And do what?"

"I don't know yet," she says. "We'll all figure it out. We're still finding our own ways forward, you know."

She doesn't say, _Are you crying?_

"I'll be in the way," Jacobi says, half-heartedly. 

Perhaps she hears the words underneath, that he doesn't say. _Please convince me. Please._ "It's got to be better than this, doesn't it?" she says. A pause. "Daniel, say yes. I _want_ you to."

Ghosts ring in his ears. But he gets up.

"So, is that a yes?" Isabel asks.

_What on earth would we ever do after this?_

He nods. "Yes."


End file.
